Use of Tools: UX Principles for Interactive Narrative Authoring Tools

The technology supporting Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) is of particular significance to cultural heritage research. IDN technology provides a means of engagement in cultural heritage sites, a medium for culturally significant stories, and culturally significant story-centric games. While previous work in this space has numerous examples of user experience (UX) evaluations of the interactive narrative works themselves, there is significantly less in terms of evaluation of technology for authoring IDN, creating a UX research space in this area that is focused on the audience and not authors. We propose to balance this focus by considering the UX of authoring tools more closely. In this work, we undertake a review of the state of the art of authoring tools for IDN, such as story-centric games, and report on a rigorous UX evaluation of representative technologies (n = 21). We also address the challenges of UX research for these tools through an original evaluation methodology where authors complete a story composed of representative story features. Our study leads us to conclude seven UX principles for IDN authoring tools that explore both how authors use tools to create story-focused games and how the interface for these tools impacts the creative process.